With the netscape 4.7 installed from netscape-common-4.7-1.1.i386.rpm and netscape-communicator-4.7-1.1.i386.rpm any user can crash the system: Just by trying to enter new mail. When the user cliks on "new message" or "reply" nothing happens a few seconds and after that the whole Linux freezes. This didn't happen on netscape 4.6. I also tried this on several machines with slightly different setups.
I can't reproduce this here. Clicking on "new message", or reply, or other things of that sort pops up the message composition window just fine. Does it persist if you remove your ~/.netscape directory? ------- Additional Comments From 10/26/99 13:15 ------- Yes it does. It even happens if I create a new user account. The only things in common for all the systems are RedHat 6.0, netscape 4.7 and kernel 2.2.12.
Hmm... can't reproduce it here, with the same packages. What X server are you using? Can you switch consoles at all?
I use XFree86-SVGA-3.3.3.1-52. The system hangs totally (doesn't respond to any keys, doesn't even answer to ping from network).
What graphics card are you using?
One machine has a 16MB TNT card, some laptops have NeoMagics and some systems (HP Brio) have some card integrated on the mother board which I think is S3 Trio64 or somethink like that.
After some debugging we found out that the bug was actually in the nfs system. The NFS server we used was an older Red Hat nfsd, which didn't support locks (we use it because the nfsd in newer Red Hats is way too buggy). Netscape tries to get the flock structure with the F_GETLK -command. This causes the system to stop responding (if we run the netscape on a different machine we can see lot's of error messages on the screen, way too fast to be read). We also found a workaround: We added the "nolocks" mount option. With it netscape seems to work just fine.